In the aftermath of a notorious massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops, Lieutenant William Calley was court-martialed and convicted. The only person convicted of any crime in relation to the massacre, Calley served three days in the stockade before President Richard M. Nixon ordered that the remainder of his sentence be served in his quarters under house arrest.
The My Lai massacre occurred during the first hours of a March 16, 1968, operation carried out by a battalion-sized unit, code-named Task Force Barker
Following the surprise Tet Offensive launched by the Viet Cong
On March 15, Lieutenant Colonel Frank A. Barker announced a three-day sweep against the Viet Cong 48th Local Forces battalion operating in and around a large, coastal fishing village. This was the third such operation against this village since February. Barker planned to move his three infantry companies into place by helicopter about 8:00
Company C landed at 7:30
The men of Company C expected to encounter two armed Viet Cong companies. Captain Ernest Medina, commander of Company C, had instructed his officers to burn the houses and destroy the livestock, crops, and foodstuffs in My Lai. Several men from Company C later testified that Captain Medina, who stayed at the landing zone, had specifically instructed them to kill civilians found in the hamlets. Medina denied such statements.
Calley’s platoon slaughtered two large groups of villagers sometime between 7:50
About 8:30
While this killing was going on, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompsom, Jr., an experienced combat helicopter pilot, was flying close overhead in an armed observation craft. At various times from 8:00
Bodies line a road in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. This photograph, taken by Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle, caused international outrage when it was published in Life magazine.
The truth of these events was covered up within the Americal Division for a year, until a letter from a Vietnam veteran, Ronald Ridenhour
Lieutenant General William R. Peers was assigned responsibility for conducting the official investigation of the incident. He learned that Hugh Thompsom’s angry, but accurate, accusations of a civilian massacre, as well as reports by South Vietnamese officials of more than five hundred civilian deaths, were never properly investigated. Peers’s report of March, 1970, contained detailed findings about what happened at My Lai and a recommendation that thirty individuals be held for possible charges.
The Army preferred charges against a total of twenty-five men: twelve for war crimes and thirteen for other military offenses. Four of the five men eventually tried on war-crime charges were members of Company C. The fifth was Captain Eugene Kotouc
Charges were brought in 1970 against thirteen officers in the Americal Division for various military offenses that were less than war crimes and did not involve murder or attempted murder. Charges were dismissed against several of the officers, and several had their cases resolved in other manners. Only four men were tried for the war crime of murdering civilians, all members of Company C: Captain Medina, the company commander; Lieutenant Calley, in command of one of the company’s platoons; Staff Sergeant David Mitchell
Initially, seven enlisted men from Company C had been charged by the Army with crimes including murder, rape, and assault. Charges against five were dropped and two men were tried. The first court-martial resulting from My Lai was that of Mitchell, a career soldier; it began in October, 1970, at Fort Hood, Texas. Mitchell was acquitted of all charges. While Calley’s trial was still in session, Hutto was tried at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and found innocent. Medina’s trial took place at Fort McPherson in August and September, 1971, after Calley’s March, 1971, conviction. Medina was found not guilty of murder and assault.
Calley’s trial was the most prominent of all the courts-martial. He had been identified from the start as ordering the shooting of women and children and was tried under article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for premeditated murder of more than one hundred Vietnamese. The trial at Fort Benning, Georgia, began on November 17, 1970, and lasted about four months. On March 29, 1971, Calley was found guilty of three counts of murder by a panel of six officers. He was sentenced “to be confined at hard labor for the rest of [his] natural life; to be dismissed from the service; to forfeit all pay and allowances.” Two days later, President Richard M. Nixon ordered Calley released from the stockade and returned to his quarters to serve his sentence. In August, 1971, the Army reduced Calley’s sentence to twenty years, and in April, 1974, further reduced it to ten years. In the Army, prisoners become eligible for parole after one-third of their sentence is served. With Calley’s punishment reduced to ten years, he became eligible in the fall of 1974 and parole was granted in November.
The reactions both to the My Lai massacre and to Lieutenant Calley’s conviction cover a tremendous range. Most Americans and many people around the world expressed horror and distress at the massacre itself, yet a great many considered Lieutenant Calley to be a scapegoat. To some, it was not Lieutenant Calley or the others who were tried in courts-martial, but the United States that was on trial for its Vietnam war.
The outcome of the courts-martial reveals that no one—not the Army, the president, Congress, or the American public—relished punishing American fighting men for their conduct in Vietnam. The Army backed away from a joint trial of the accused and did not carry through the stern spirit of justice that pervades the official Peers Report.
American official and popular statements from the time typically express outrage toward the massacre itself but suggest that it would be best to reserve judgment about Calley’s or others’ guilt. Some veterans and Army members believed that Calley was being punished for one of the inevitable tragedies of war. Still others believed Calley had done only what the army had trained him to do: kill communists. Many believed, in contrast, that since the United States was fighting to protect Vietnam from communism, the Army should be saving, or at least protecting, Vietnamese civilians.
Immediately following Calley’s conviction for murder, the White House and Congress received a strong wave of popular sympathy for him. It was believed that Calley’s conviction condemned, by implication, all Americans who had fought in Vietnam. Others believed that what occurred at My Lai were war crimes and that Calley, and others, should have been punished by death in the same way that German and Japanese war criminals were following World War II.
Beneath these opposing emotional calls for Calley’s release or execution, the My Lai massacre and the subsequent courts-martial had a profound impact on the United States and the Army. Knowledge of the massacre came twenty-one months after the Tet Offensive, but it was additional confirmation that hopes for an American victory in Vietnam were unfounded. If U.S. troops were slaughtering the South Vietnamese, how could the people ever be won over to the side of the United States?
People also wondered if My Lai was only the first of many such massacres that would come to light. In fact, evidence of thousands of unnecessary and unwarranted deaths of South Vietnamese civilians caused by U.S. and other allied units have been documented, but nothing quite so horrible as that at My Lai.
Simply because of the questions raised about possible American atrocities in Vietnam, the whole discussion of the war itself took on a new color. The massacre gave proof to those antiwar protestors who called the war immoral and unjust. The atrocity marked an end, or at least a profound shock, to trust in American goodness and nobility of purpose.
In the 1970’s, evidence of various hidden schemes and deadly plans by the U.S. government came to light, many of them completely unconnected with My Lai. The My Lai massacre remains a key incident that loosed the tide of self-doubt and questioning about the United States’ purpose and moral stature that marked much of national life in the 1970’s and 1980’s. One of the most profound and lasting impacts of the My Lai massacre and the Calley court-martial was the coldness and distaste Vietnam veterans encountered after 1969 upon return to the United States. Many Americans treated all veterans as if they had joined with Company C to abuse and murder Vietnamese women and children. For those remaining in the military service, the vision of a unit running amok killing civilians in Vietnam’s guerrilla war was one of several powerful forces that led to major reforms in Army military doctrine and the abandonment of the draft in favor of an all-volunteer armed services. Finally, whatever one’s reaction to the trial, the fact that it even took place, in a world where war crimes routinely went uninvestigated and untried, was a tribute to a dawning awareness that governments should prosecute and punish war crimes.
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Anderson, David L., ed. Facing My Lai: Moving Beyond the Massacre. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. The author provides a vivid retelling of this tragic incident in American history. Includes useful supplementary research tools. -
Calley, William. Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story, as Told to John Sack. New York: Viking Press, 1971. After interviewing Calley at length in 1969 and 1970, the author says he took Calley’s words and feelings apart and put them back together as a continuous story. Revealing. -
Hammer, Richard. The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971. Although highly unfavorable to Lieutenant Calley, this is a useful summary of the trial itself, containing large amounts of verbatim testimony from Calley and men of his unit. -
Hersh, Seymour. My Lai Four: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. New York: Random House, 1970. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about the My Lai incident. Here he brings together the early evidence of a massacre in a compelling way. The book is somewhat dated by the later courts-martial and the release of the Peers Report. -
Oliver, Kendrick. The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory. New York: Manchester University Press, 2006. Traces both the immediate and the lasting effects of the massacre and trial upon American culture and politics. Bibliographic references and index. -
Olson, James S., and Randy Roberts. My Lai: A Brief History with Documents. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. This text gathers sixty-eight primary documents to further illuminate the My Lai massacre. Illustrated and indexed, with glossary, chronology, and bibliography. -
Peers, William R. The My Lai Inquiry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Peers wrote this reflective, detailed book years after the official inquiry. A fascinating, readable summary of the massacre and its aftermath. Full of balanced, careful judgments. Indispensable. -
Sim, Kevin, and Michael Bilton. Four Hours in My Lai. New York: Viking Press, 1992. Sim and Bilton, two British documentary filmmakers, reconstruct events leading up to the massacre, document the events, and report on the subsequent cover-ups and trials. Much of the material comes from interviews conducted in the 1980’s and 1990’s. -
United States Department of the Army. The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up—Beyond the Reach of the Law? The Peers Commission Report: Joseph Goldstein, Burke Marshall, and Jack Schwartz. New York: Free Press, 1976. In 1974, the Army released most of its official inquiry, commonly known as the Peers Report. This volume is the most convenient place to find the text of the Peers Report. Supplements deal with general war crime issues and some war crime matters relating to the Vietnam era. Be sure to distinguish between this official report and General Peer’s own account.
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